Here's a follow-up of sorts to the story I posted a few days ago about the number of Chicago Public School students killed by guns this year. This past weekend another student, 17-year-old Chavez Clarke, was shot and killed, prompting his classmates and other Chicago teens to organize a rally to raise awareness and to push for tougher gun laws in Illinois. Read the Chicago Tribune's account here.
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It's frustrating when you try to pick a fight with “the system”, or “the machine”, or whatever you want to call it, because you’re in the ring with an opponent that’s much bigger than you. And it doesn’t appear to move when you hit it. So, taking your best swings can seem like a waste of energy. You’re David with no slingshot.
It’s much easier to point the finger of blame at a smaller target. For instance, from the comfort of an affluent suburb, it’s a lot easier to dismiss this issue as a “city” issue. Read it in the newspaper, and move on. There are a number of other ones you can use, wherever you are. “Probably a gang issue”, “they must have been hanging with the wrong crowd”, come to mind. By stating these as the problems, the solutions are easier to pin down.
But the fact is, there are bigger things at work here. That’s not to take the blame from the individual situations, and solely identify the “system” as the main perpetrator. Bullets don’t fly around because guns are easy to get your hands on. There’s got to be fingers to pull the trigger.
But the people who kill are killing in a culture of violence. Where it is glorified, even, in many movies, shows, and songs. And to glorify is to justify. So when I hear that 21 KIDS have been killed this year in Chicago and laws aren’t changing, it feels like the structure (IE lawmakers, the media) are not fighting on our side.
If I can be so audacious as to quote Bono (yeah, that’s right), he said the following in his Commencement Address at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004, and I feel it holds some weight with this, and also with many of the other issues we have discussed in this class:
“There's a truly great Irish poet his name is Brendan Kennelly, and he has this epic poem called the Book of Judas, and there's a line in that poem that never leaves my mind, it says: "If you want to serve the age, betray it." What does that mean to betray the age?
Well to me betraying the age means exposing its conceits, it's foibles; it's phony moral certitudes. It means telling the secrets of the age and facing harsher truths.
Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will. Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as it was--which was ungodly and inhuman…
Segregation. There was another one. America sees this now but it took a civil rights movement to betray their age. And 50 years ago the U.S. Supreme Court betrayed the age May 17, 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education came down and put the lie to the idea that separate can ever really be equal. Amen to that.
Fast forward 50 years… What are the ideas right now worth betraying? What are the lies we tell ourselves now? What are the blind spots of our age?”
I feel that the ideas that guns save lives, or that the laws that make them easier to find their place in our homes, neighborhoods, and schools, are terrible ones. I believe they are ideas worth betraying.
So it’s inspiring to see these CPS students taking a stand, getting into the ring, and throwing some punches. Especially because it might take a movement before we see "the system" start to fall. But how many more kids have to die before more people start fighting alongside them?
You know when you have a problem when a group of high school teenagers are rallying for a cause. This rally really displays that the students of the Chicago Public Schools have had enough with the deaths and the funerals of their fellow classmates.
I think there are many possible solutions to controlling guns and shootings at public schools, but I do not think there is a resolution. I believe that regardless of the amounts of metal detectors, security guards, gang control, or after school activities present at schools, students still find a way and a reason.
The government can try to take guns off the streets, but that is also violating the public's right to bear arms. Whenever there is one possible resolution in sight, there is always a million factors that will throw that option out the window. I believe schools are doing their best to inforce safety with the instillation of metal detections and increasing the number of security guards/hall monitors. I believe the problem lies within the students not the government or the school system.
Students cannot seem resolve their problems without a barrel of a gun or their fists.
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